Cory Doctorow's RIAA / DNC Delusion

I like Cory Doctorow & BoingBoing but every once in a while he seems to forget how things work in the real world.

He had a post today about the Democratic National Committee hiring a PR person for their 2008 convention who also works for the RIAA.  Cory is treating this like the world is ending:

The DNC can do better. This represents a potential shear with the left-wing blogosphere. I hate what the GOP has done to this country, but the RIAA isn't much better.

Guess what, political parties reward the groups that support them, and the music production industry generously supports the DNC.  According to Open Secrets, between 1990 and 2006, 78% of the donations from the music industry have gone to the Democrats, to the tune of $13.6 million.  The Republicans only received $3.7 million in the same time frame.  In the 2006 election cycle, Democratic congressmen (and candidates) received $1,064,944 while Republicans received $458,677 (per Open Sources).  Hillary Clinton and Dianne Feinstein were the biggest recipients of the music industry's largess.

There is only one class in Congress, the incumbent class.  Congressmen of both parties, for the most part, are more interested in staying in Congress than protecting the rights of kids who may or may not have downloaded MP3s using Bittorrent.  The DMCA was passed in 1998.  In both the House and the Senate, the final bill was passed unanimously and Bill Clinton  signed it in a big Rose Garden ceremony.  Doesn't sound like a Rovian plot to me.

It may be that Cory is more upset with the person that the DNC chose than the fact that she works for the RIAA.  In his post he documents his past run ins with Jenni Engebretsen:

Engebretsen's PR approach is centered around stonewalling and avoiding difficult press calls. She contacted me in 2005 to deny that the RIAA had sent a takedown notice to a website called RPGFilms.net, and promised to answer my followup questions in a day or two. After four months of emailing and calling her, I finally got through to her (by calling her from a different phone, so she couldn't see who was phoning).

And it isn't like she's new to working with the Democratic party.  She previously worked for Dick Durbin & Chuck Schumer in their communications offices and before that in the Clinton White House.

There probably is a time & place to "bring down the wrath of the liberal blogosphere"  on the DNC for something.  I personally would pick the $20 billion in pork barrel spending in the Iraq war funding bill & an unwillingness to follow the requirements of the earmarks reform act passed earlier this year, but that's just me.  Spending political capital on who the lead PR person is for the 2008 convention seems to me like a waste of time.

Comments

[gib]

I see where you're going with this, but I think it is you that doesn't understand the real world. There's one especially key concept you actually wrote but failed to realize – Hillary Clinton.

Conspiracy theory? Maybe. But it's quite obvious who's pulling the strings. It's, as you wrote, the incumbents who care more about winning elections than the people they were voted into office by. And since Hillary Clinton is the most powerful incumbent, who is one of the largest recipients of money from the RIAA... well then what do we have here?

If that's not Rovian I don't know what is.

The fact is that in the real world Democrats are trying to portray themselves as people-powered. Hiring a woman whose sole job is to justify lawsuits against underprivileged people almost exclusively is not people powered and is just another example of the democrats wasting opportunities to get... well people like me... to actually go and vote (for them).

I can tell you if they stick with this woman and prop up some corporate shill like Hillary Clinton then I definitely will not be voting Democrat. This would mean that I would again have to "siphon" off votes from the Democrats by voting Green or Libertarian.

[Jesse Cantu]

The RIAA has become increasinly emboldened and aggressive. We're capable of combatting this phenomenon. The RIAA and other industry groups are lobbying your elected officials now - what can you do? Jon Longoria goes over the specifics of a brief strategy which takes the ball game to the industry and lawmakers on their terms. Get in on what we as music enthusiasts can do to stop our online civil liberties from being trampled. http://thereformed.org/2008/08/27/riaa-lobbies-at-dnc/ . I think his article well defines a concise methodology that we need to adopt.